Hungry? May I Take Your Order Then?

🍥  NARUTO UZUMAKI — 590

Naruto’s face betrayed him the moment he saw your tears, and something in his expression crumpled. Your pain struck him as though it were physical. His first instinct was written plainly across his face, to rush forwards, pull you into his arms and pour so much love over the wound that it couldn’t possibly remain open.

But then he saw the panic in your eyes and he stopped.

It cost him something to restrain himself, but he did. He had spent too much of his life being lonely to assume that company always felt like comfort. Love, he had learnt, was not merely giving everything; it was listening when somebody told you what they could receive.

He crouched a short distance away so that he wasn’t towering over you.

“Okay,” he said softly. “Do you want company, distraction or privacy?”

The question was so simple that it took you a moment to answer.

If you chose company, Naruto sat beside you. He didn’t demand an explanation, only offered his hand, palm upwards, and let you decide whether to take it. If you did, his fingers closed tightly around yours. He looked straight ahead while you cried, although his own eyes grew suspiciously bright.

If you chose distraction, he committed completely. Naruto began telling you about something harmless and absurd—an argument with Kurama, a disastrous attempt at cooking, an increasingly implausible story involving Konohamaru and an offended shopkeeper. He kept his voice gentle, watching your breathing from the corner of his eye. He wasn’t trying to make you laugh your pain away, he was giving your mind somewhere softer to rest until you could bear to return to it.

And if you chose privacy, Naruto nodded.

“Okay. I’ll be outside.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know.”

He closed the door behind him and planted himself directly in front of it. Naruto left you alone without abandoning you.

Anyone who approached was immediately redirected and he invented increasingly unconvincing reasons why the room was unavailable. There was maintenance happening. An emergency meeting. A highly dangerous structural problem. When Sakura pointed out that this was clearly a storage room, Naruto folded his arms and announced that the storage was confidential.

Nobody got past him.

He didn’t listen through the door or ask how long you needed. He only waited, making sure the solitude remained yours rather than becoming another form of abandonment.

When you eventually emerged, Naruto rose immediately, though he still didn’t touch you until you made the choice. The instant you stepped into his arms, however, he gathered you so close that your feet nearly left the ground. His embrace was warm, fierce and trembling at the edges.

“You don’t have to tell me,” he murmured into your hair, “but you don’t have to pretend either.”

If you apologised for making him worry, Naruto pulled back just far enough to look at you.

“You’re allowed to worry me.” It sounded almost indignant. “That’s what happens when somebody loves you. You don’t have to make yourself easy all the time just so I won’t care.”

Naruto could not promise that he would never react too loudly or love too visibly. The sight of you hurting would always affect him, but he could promise to ask rather than assume. To sit outside the door when the door was what you needed, to be waiting on the other side when you were ready to open it.

You could ask him to leave and you would never have to wonder whether he was truly gone.

🐸  MASTER JIRAIYA — 635

Jiraiya knew that sometimes dignity needed an escape route.

When he walked in and found you hurriedly wiping your face, his first response was not alarm. He immediately glanced elsewhere, giving you the small mercy of pretending he hadn’t seen more than you intended.

“Ah,” he said, turning halfway towards the door. “Terrible timing. I’ll leave and come back in five minutes. You can tell me you’ve got something in your eye, and I’ll demonstrate my remarkable talent for believing obvious lies.”

It was ridiculous enough to loosen some of the panic in your chest. That was what the humour was for, to hand control of the situation back to you rather than trivialise your tears. If you laughed and told him to go away, Jiraiya left. If you asked him to stay, he settled nearby without making a production of it. He might even have offered you a handkerchief while solemnly claiming it was clean enough to qualify as a medical instrument.

But then you whispered an apology, you called yourself dramatic, you insisted it was stupid, that other people had endured worse and you had no right to be sitting there crying over something so small.

All the frivolity left him. Jiraiya had spent much of his life making himself appear less serious than he was. The change was startling when he allowed that performance to fall away; his face grew still, his voice quiet.

“Don’t do that.”

There was no scolding in it, but there was enough weight to make you look at him.

“Don’t decide you have to earn the right to hurt.”

Jiraiya had buried friends. He had watched children inherit wars they did not create and seen entire countries reduced to battlegrounds. He knew well how vast suffering could become but that had never made him cruel about its smaller, more private forms. Pain was not rendered meaningless in his eyes because it had failed to kill you.

He sat beside you with his forearms braced loosely over his knees, near without crowding. He didn’t offer hollow promises, and he didn’t seize the conversation to tell you about his own losses. His experience was present only in the steadiness with which he received yours.

If you wanted to talk, Jiraiya listened properly. There were no interruptions disguised as advice, no impatient search for a solution while you were still trying to name what had happened. When your explanation became tangled or contradictory, he didn’t correct it. He understood that people were rarely articulate at the centre of their pain. If you didn’t want to talk, he accepted that too.

He offered his arm rather than assuming you wanted to be held. When you finally leant into him, his warmth was immediate and encompassing. One broad hand rested between your shoulders, moving in slow, absent circles. There was something unexpectedly paternal in the way he sheltered you, but never infantilising. He didn’t treat you as fragile, he treated you as someone who had been carrying more than they should have carried alone.

“You can be capable and still need comfort,” he said. “Those things aren’t enemies.”

Eventually, when you had exhausted yourself, a little of his familiar levity returned. 

He peered down at his damp shirt. “I hope you know this has completely destroyed my reputation as a heartless scoundrel.”

“You’ve never had that reputation.”

“Then you understand how serious the situation is. I was still trying to establish it.”

The laugh he earned from you was watery and reluctant, but he smiled as though it were something precious.

He never mentioned the incident to anyone or hover conspicuously afterwards. But for the rest of the day, food appeared within your reach, unwanted interruptions were somehow redirected, and Jiraiya remained close enough to find without ever making you feel watched.

⚡ SASUKE UCHIHA — 525

Sasuke heard you before he saw you.

Not the sound of crying itself—you had become far too practised at keeping that quiet—but the uneven breath abruptly stifled when his footsteps approached. He stopped outside the doorway and for several seconds, neither of you moved.

Then Sasuke entered, closed the door and sat beside it.

He didn’t ask what was wrong. He didn’t say your name in that soft, concerned voice that would have made the fragile control inside you disintegrate. He didn’t demand that you look at him, and his eyes remained fixed somewhere ahead rather than on the hands you were desperately using to hide your face.

“I won’t tell anyone.”

The certainty of it dispersed into the room. Sasuke understood that being seen could feel dangerous. He understood the reflex to conceal any weakness before somebody had the opportunity to exploit, dismiss or pity it. Whatever was happening inside you, he would not turn it into information that belonged to anyone else.

He simply remained by the door, quiet and watchful. After a long pause, he added, “You don’t have to hide it from me.”

That was all.

There were no promises that he could fix it, no insistence that you confide in him to prove that you trusted him. Sasuke knew that trust was not measured by how quickly someone could force themselves open while they were hurting. Sometimes it was only the knowledge that they would be permitted to remain closed without being abandoned.

He didn’t touch you first, either. Even when your shoulders began to shake, every instinct in him restrained beneath a perfectly still exterior, his hand remained loosely folded in his lap. Sasuke’s care was not invasive, he would not make your vulnerable body another thing you had to defend, but when your hand finally searched blindly across the space between you and caught at his sleeve, he moved at once.

His fingers closed around yours. Firm. Warm. Certain.

If you leant against him, Sasuke shifted so that your face was hidden against his shoulder and his body was positioned between yours and the door. His arm came around you slowly enough that you could pull away, then tightened when you didn’t. Sasuke held you like an oath, completely and without spectacle.

He never told you to stop crying, he barely spoke at all. When your breathing caught painfully, his thumb moved once over the back of your hand.

“I’m here.”

If you told him what had happened, he listened with a focus that could feel almost severe. He remembered every detail. When you finished, he asked only one question:

“Do you want me to do something, or stay?”

Whichever you chose, he obeyed.

Later, Sasuke never referred to the moment in front of others. He gave no meaningful looks and offered no public gentleness that might expose you. You began to notice, however, that he coolly intercepted the people who exhausted you, watched more closely when you claimed to be fine, and always left an empty place open beside him.

He kept your secret. He also made certain you never had to keep it entirely alone again.

⏳ SABAKU NO GAARA — 574

Gaara noticed long before he found you crying.

He had seen the strain around your eyes throughout the day, the way your answers had grown progressively shorter while your smile became increasingly careful. He recognised what it looked like when composure stopped being a natural state and became something actively maintained. There had been years when Gaara’s every waking moment was an exercise in swallowing pain before anybody could see it and use it against him. He knew that a person could appear perfectly functional while privately holding themselves together with bleeding hands.

He didn’t confront you in front of anyone. He didn’t follow too closely when you eventually excused yourself, either. He gave you enough time to believe that you had escaped unnoticed before calmly going after you.

When he found you tucked away somewhere private, shoulders trembling despite every effort to keep yourself silent, he didn’t say your name with alarm. He didn’t ask what had happened or whether you were crying when the answer was already obvious. Most importantly, he didn’t remain standing over you and make you feel observed.

Gaara simply closed the door. He sat beside you—not so close that you felt trapped, but near enough that you could feel the steady warmth of him—and looked ahead rather than forcing you to meet his eyes.

“You don’t have to stop because I’m here.”

It was that permission, spoken without pity or embarrassment, which finally broke whatever control you had left.

Gaara didn’t flinch when your breathing fractured. He didn’t rush to hush you or tell you that everything would be all right before he knew whether it would. He simply stayed. If you covered your face, he let you. If you turned away from him, he didn’t interpret it as rejection. A faint stir of sand settled near the bottom of the door, muffling the sound and quietly ensuring that nobody could enter without warning.

He didn’t touch you until you leant towards him or blindly reached for his hand. The moment you did, however, his restraint softened and his fingers closed carefully around yours. When you folded into him, Gaara gathered you against his chest with a tenderness that never felt tentative, one arm firm around your back while his other hand cradled the base of your skull.

There was no discomfort in him when your tears soaked into his clothes, no impatience when you tried to speak and couldn’t force the words through your throat.

“You don’t have to explain yet,” he murmured. “Breathe first.”

Only when the worst of it had passed did he ask what you needed. Not what was wrong, as though you owed him an account of your suffering, but whether you wanted to tell him, whether there was something he could do, whether you would prefer to remain there a little longer.

If you confessed that you hadn’t wanted anyone to see you like this, something in his expression seemed to ache. Gaara understood that impulse; he also knew where it led.

“I know,” he said. His thumb passed once over your knuckles. “But you shouldn’t always have to wait until you’re alone.”

He never exposed what he had witnessed. Later, in front of everyone else, he treated you exactly as he always had. The only difference was that he remained slightly nearer, an unspoken promise at your shoulder that if the armour cracked again, someone would come.

🔥 MADARA UCHIHA — 645

Madara recognised the armour easily because it resembled his own.

He saw the precise moment yours began to fail—the stiffness of your spine, the tension locked into your jaw, the abrupt way you left before emotion could become visible. Others might have accepted whatever excuse you offered. Madara did not. He had spent a lifetime turning grief into severity and fear into something that looked like anger. He knew what it meant when dignity became a weapon turned against the self.

When he found you, you were already trying to repair the damage.

Your face was turned away. Your tears had been wiped so harshly that the skin beneath your eyes was reddened, and your breathing was being forced into a rhythm it couldn’t yet maintain. The instant you realised he was there, you straightened. Whether you apologised or merely insisted that you needed a moment, Madara’s expression darkened.

Not because you were crying, but because you believed you had to stop for him.

“Do not mistake my witnessing you for humiliation.”

There was something almost offended in the words. The suggestion that your pain might lessen you in his estimation was intolerable to him; worse still was the implication that he had ever allowed you to believe his love extended only to the invulnerable parts of you.

He shut the door with finality and placed himself between you and it.

Madara didn’t merely offer privacy, he became its physical embodiment. Broad shoulders, armour and formidable chakra stood between you and the entire world. Nobody would enter, nobody would witness what you had not chosen to show them. For however long you required it, the room belonged to you, and the man guarding its threshold belonged to you more completely still.

Then he turned back and saw you struggling to suppress another sob and his face changed.

Madara crossed the distance between you, but even then he gave you one final second to refuse. When you didn’t, he undid the fastenings of his armour with brisk, practised movements. He pushed the hard plates aside and opened the dark robe beneath until there was warm, bare skin where there had been iron.

“There,” he said, as though solving a logistical problem. “Come here.”

Madara pulled you against his chest.

There was nowhere for you to collapse except into him. One immense hand spread between your shoulder blades and the other cupped at the back of your head, holding you securely beneath his chin. His heartbeat was deep and steady against your cheek. He didn’t rock you or smother you in pretty reassurances, he simply made himself immovable.

You shook, you wept hard enough that you could scarcely breathe, and Madara remained exactly where he was, bearing your full weight as though this were another form of battle and he had never once contemplated retreat. If you apologised, his arm tightened.

“No.”

“It’s stupid—”

“No.” The word reverberated beneath your ear.

“You will not belittle your suffering merely because you survived it in silence.”

Madara understood that pain concealed was not pain conquered. He understood, perhaps too well, how often a person was praised for strength when what they had actually been was abandoned.

He didn’t demand the source of your tears while you were still drowning in them. That would come later, once your breathing had settled and your hands no longer clutched desperately at his clothing. Even then, his questions were low and exact. Who caused this? Has the danger passed? What needs to be done?

But first, he held you.

He pressed his mouth to your hair. His robe and armour remained open around you, the hard exterior temporarily transformed into a shelter, and if anybody proved foolish enough to disturb you, one glance at Madara’s face sent them immediately elsewhere.

Your armour had cracked, but his could bear the weight of you both.

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Three days later, with the wounded accounted for and Izuna returned from the southern watch with only a shallow cut across his shoulder, life within the Uchiha settlement had resumed its familiar wartime rhythm. Weapons were repaired beside cookfires while children carried messages between houses whose doors had been rebuilt more often than painted. At dusk, the clan elders gathered beneath the shrine eaves to discuss borders, grain and retaliation, because even survival had its bureaucracy.

You attended the council beside Madara and watched his hands rest on the table.

You ate across from him that evening and watched those same hands break apart a grilled river fish with the delicate efficiency of a surgeon.

Now, standing opposite him in the private training yard behind the house you shared, your yukata wrapped loosely around you against the evening chill, you watched him undo the ties at his wrists and discovered the sickness had only been waiting for privacy.

Madara stripped away his guards and placed them beside his gunbai. His forearms bore the pale seams of old wounds, the history of a hundred battles written without ornament across skin and muscle. His strength lived in the dense architecture of him, in shoulders made to carry armour and arms accustomed to rendering resistance irrelevant, but what unsettled you was how little of it he appeared to need. He never strained, never lunged after power already his. The world seemed to surrender its balance the moment before he touched it.

“You have been staring,” he said.

“I’ve been waiting.”

“For what?”

“For you to finish admiring yourself.”

His eyes lifted, and the affection hidden inside his displeasure was so familiar that it nearly made you smile. Nearly. A wiser person might have looked away, but you had loved Madara long enough to know that wisdom was not always the same thing as survival, and neither had ever prevented you from provoking him.

He straightened, leaving the guards on the ground. “Come here.”

“You’re on the other side of the yard.”

“I’m aware.”

“Then you come here.”

The silence that followed was occupied by something vast and watchful. Madara could fill stillness until it felt like contested territory; even the evening insects seemed to retreat from it, their thin music quieting beneath the darkening cedars. His mouth did not smile, though one corner tightened with the knowledge that you had done precisely what he expected and pleased him by doing it.

“No,” he countered. “You will come to me.”

You folded your arms.

Madara waited.

His patience was more oppressive than anger would have been. Anger could be provoked, spent and survived, but patience allowed him to observe while you became conscious of every foolish thing your body was doing beneath his attention—the heat gathering under your clothes, the shallowness of your breathing, the pulse he could probably see beating in your throat. He had shared your bed too long to mistake any of it; he knew how desire altered the set of your mouth before you admitted to wanting anything and how pride made you most defiant when you were already halfway to surrender.

Still, you held your ground.

At last, he crossed the yard.

There was no haste in his approach. Dust shifted beneath his sandals, the dying sun catching like old blood along the segmented edges of his armour, and each unhurried step made your refusal feel less like defiance than an invitation you had been too proud to speak plainly. He stopped before you, close enough that your folded arms pressed lightly against his chest.

“You have been watching my hands,” he murmured.

Your stomach tightened. “Have I?”

“During the council, at dinner, now.” His eyes travelled over your face with the thoroughness of a hunt, lingering where warmth had begun to gather beneath your skin. “You’re not subtle.”

“I don’t need to be subtle in my own home.”

“No,” he agreed. “You need only be honest.”

“And if I have been looking?”

“Then I would know why.”

You tilted your head. “Perhaps I admire your calluses.”

Madara’s hand closed around your wrist.

The movement was so swift that you registered the capture before you saw it. One moment your arms were folded; the next, one had been drawn away from your body, your pulse trapped beneath the firm press of his fingers. He did not squeeze; he had no need to persuade you of a strength you had watched break armies.

Something hot and involuntary contracted low in your belly.

Madara felt the answering leap beneath his thumb. His eyes lowered to where he held you, then returned to your face with a terrible, dawning comprehension.

“This.” he observed. You tugged once but his grip did not shift by so much as the breadth of a hair. “You saw something.”

You tried to pull your hand free again, harder now, and Madara permitted your effort to exhaust itself against his stillness. There was no contest between you because a contest required uncertainty, and the arm with which you strained was held in place as though it had become part of the earth. His thumb passed once across your pulse.

“Tell me.”

“No.”

Madara turned, and your balance vanished. He rotated your wrist with exacting pressure, stepped across the line of your body and took possession of the momentum created by your own resistance. The yard tilted, your back struck his chest hard enough to empty your lungs and his other arm locked across your waist before your feet had properly found the ground.

You had watched him do it to an enemy. Now, recognition tore through you so sharply that your thighs pressed together.

Madara went still behind you. For one incandescent moment, neither of you spoke. His breath touched the shell of your ear, his forearm lay like a bar of iron across your middle, holding you flush against the hard planes of his body, while your captured wrist remained folded against your breast. You could feel the shape of every weapon he had chosen not to bring against you, and beneath that knowledge ran another, older certainty—this was the man who slept with his back exposed only when you were beside him, who placed his gunbai within your reach as readily as his own, who knew the fragile geography of your body and had never once mistaken possession for permission.

Then he laughed, quietly and almost without belief, and the sound was infinitely worse than mockery.

“You watched me throw that man.”

Heat surged into your face. “I’ve watched you kill several dozen men. You’ll need to be more specific.”

“You watched me take his balance.” Madara tightened his arm and lifted you until your heels left the ground. The effortless elevation sent a violent tremor through you. “You watched me decide where his body would go.”

“Put me down.”

“You do not want that.”

His certainty struck more keenly than any taunt. Still, his arm loosened at once and your feet touched the earth. He released you completely, then stepped back, leaving a clear path between you and the house.

“Go, then,” he said.

There was no amusement in his face now. He was watching to see what you would do with the freedom he had returned, because he knew you too well to accept anything less than a choice made whole.

You could leave. Instead, you seized the front of his armour and pulled him down into a kiss.

Madara allowed precisely one heartbeat of triumph before his hand entered your hair. He caught you at the nape and controlled the angle of your head as his mouth opened over yours, claiming the decision you had made without sweetening what would follow from it. When you bit his lower lip, he answered by closing his fist in your hair until the bright tension along your scalp bared your throat.

“There,” he murmured against your mouth. “Now that was honesty.”

“Insufferable bastard.”

His fingers flexed, tipping your head farther back. “Again.”

You stared at him through lowered lashes, breathing hard. “Bastard.”

Madara kissed you with enough force to bruise. One arm swept beneath your thighs while the other closed around your back, and the earth dropped away without warning. You caught at his shoulders, a useless reflex that made his mouth curve against yours.

He carried you inside as though your weight had failed to register. There was nothing courtly in the journey; he bore you against his chest, your legs separated around the breadth of his hips while his mouth moved from yours to the vulnerable line beneath your jaw. When you twisted, seeking friction against him, Madara altered his hold and forced your hips still.

“Do not steal what you have asked me to give.”

“I didn’t ask you for anything.”

His teeth closed over your throat, close enough to danger that your next breath caught against them. “No, you merely stared at my hands for three days.”

The bedroom door stood slightly ajar. Madara drove your back against it and sent it swinging inward until the wood struck the wall, then carried you across the threshold without breaking stride and made no attempt to close it behind you. The two of you lived alone at the settlement’s quietest edge, and the open doorway remained at your back like evidence of how little privacy concerned him once he had decided to take you apart.

He set you on your feet beside the bed and turned you by the shoulders before your balance had settled until your knees met the edge of the mattress. One broad palm pressed between your shoulder blades that folded you forwards until your hands struck the bedding, and then his fingers closed around your hips before you could rise.

“Is this what you imagined?”

His hands spanned your waist, fixed where they could best govern you. When you tried to turn, he returned you to position with insulting ease.

“I imagined less talking.”

“Liar.”

He pulled your hips back against him. The armour between you was hard and unforgiving, its plated edge pressing into your thighs while the solid ridge of his erection met you through layers of cloth. You pushed back before pride could stop you, and Madara exhaled, deep and pleased, before drawing you away again.

You looked back over your shoulder. “Are you going to fuck me or spend the evening congratulating yourself?”

“I have not decided whether you have earned the first.”

His hand descended suddenly. The slap cracked through the room as pain bloomed across your backside with enough heat to make you gasp. Madara watched the tremor travel through you while his palm remained where it had landed, fingers sinking into the softness of your flesh as though measuring the mark he had left.

He struck you again, and this time you moaned.

“Better,” he said.

Madara bent over you, his weight driving you lower while his hair fell around you in dark, heavy curtains. One hand left your hip and seized the hem of your robe, gathering the loose fabric into his fist as he dragged it up the backs of your legs. Cool air followed his knuckles over your calves and thighs; by the time the bunched layers reached your waist, only the narrow cloth beneath them remained between his hand and your body. His mouth found your ear.

“You wanted force,” he said. “You wanted to know what becomes of strength when it has no need to destroy what it holds.”

His fingers found the soaked cloth between your thighs and traced the evidence of your desire with one mercilessly slow stroke. Your hips bucked; his forearm settled across them and kept you against the bed.

“Madara—”

“What becomes of it?”

You closed your eyes as his fingers circled where you were most sensitive, the pressure calculated to make delay unbearable. 

“Control,” you breathed.

His mouth brushed the back of your neck. “Exactly.”

He stripped you with the same pitiless efficiency he brought to armour damaged in battle. The sash surrendered to one hard pull, and Madara unwound it from your waist, dragged the loosened yukata from your shoulders and cast both aside, then pushed you farther onto the mattress until both knees rested upon it. The thin undercloth followed, stripped over your hips and freed from one ankle and then the other beneath the enclosing pressure of his hand. Only then did he remove his own armour, releasing its sections in practised succession. They struck the floor heavily enough to disturb the lamp flame.

When you turned to watch him, Madara caught your ankle before you could complete the movement. He drew your leg sideways, using it to roll you onto your back, and followed you down before you could rise. One hand gathered both wrists and raised them above your head.

Naked, he was more alarming than armoured. Battle had built him into something excessive, thick with strength that shifted beneath scarred skin as he settled between your legs. His hair spilled over his shoulders and across your breasts, its ends brushing your nipples while he looked down at what he had made of you.

You pulled against his grip and his fingers only closed more firmly around your wrists.

“Again,” he ordered.

You strained until the muscles in your arms trembled. Madara held you without visible effort, his gaze following the attempt with an attention too intent to be called amusement. He loved your refusal when it was given to him freely, loved the bright edge you brought against his certainty because both of you knew he would never have valued a surrender that cost you nothing.

His free hand closed beneath one of your knees and pressed it towards your chest. Your hips opened under his direction, leaving you exposed beneath the slow descent of his gaze.

“You are very wet,” he observed, “for a woman so determined to resist me.”

“You know how determined I am.”

“Yes.” His thumb pressed into the vulnerable tendon behind your knee, holding you wider. “I do.”

He released your knee, allowing your leg to settle open against the mattress as his palm travelled up the inside of your thigh and closed around your hip. At the same time, Madara drew back from your face and moved down your body, his hair dragging over your breasts and stomach as his lips passed beneath your navel.

He kept your wrists gathered above your head until the distance forced him to relinquish them. His hand travelled down the length of your arm, followed the curve of your ribs and came to rest upon your opposite hip. With one hand arriving from above and the other from below, he closed his grip around your waist and drew you down the mattress to meet him.

The first stroke of his tongue was broad and direct, parting you from entrance to clit with no teasing pretence. Your gasp sharpened into a cry as his mouth closed over you. When your hips lifted helplessly towards him, both palms returned them to the mattress and held them there.

Your freed hands found his hair. It flooded through your fingers, dense and coarse as a war-banner, until you gathered a fistful near the roots and pulled.

Madara’s breath struck hot against you. His mouth stilled, and his eyes rose to meet yours through the dark fall of his hair. For one suspended instant they were black, familiar and fathomless; then chakra gathered behind them and red bled across the irises like fire taking silk, and the tomoe wheeled into being one after another until the Sharingan burned between your thighs.

The change felt indecent in a way nakedness did not. You knew those eyes as instruments of war; they predicted the arc of a blade, exposed deception and turned an enemy’s intention against him before muscle could translate thought into action. Now that terrible perception fastened upon the minute tremor in your stomach and the helpless tightening of your thighs around his shoulders.

You expected correction for pulling him. Instead, his mouth curved against you.

“Harder.”

When you obeyed, the growl that moved through him vibrated directly into you, tearing a broken sound from your throat. His fingers sank more deeply into your hips, fixing you beneath him while your fist remained knotted in his hair. You could not truly direct him; even with the roots drawn taut across his scalp, Madara followed only the pressure that pleased him and resisted the rest. Yet he gave you this one piece of force to answer with, allowed you to hold the weapon responsible for your undoing, and the trust of it struck somewhere dangerously close to love.

“Madara—wait—”

He stopped completely and the absence felt immediately vicious. You stared down at him, chest heaving, while his mouth gleamed with you and the Sharingan searched your face without presumption.

“Do you need me to?” he asked.

The question was low and stripped of mockery. Your body throbbed beneath his hands and, after a moment, you shook your head.

“Say it.”

“No. Don’t stop.”

Something ferocious settled into his expression, sharpened by relief so slight another person might have missed it. You did not; you knew every guarded country of his face.

Madara lowered his mouth again with full knowledge of how close you were. One hand left your hip and two thick fingers pressed inside you, the stretch dragging a cry from you before he curved them towards the place inside that turned your muscles useless. His opposite forearm settled across your pelvis when you tried to rise, holding your hips to the mattress while his tongue worked your clit in the rhythm his Sharingan had stolen from your body.

Pleasure tightened through you like a bowstring. Your fist closed harder in his hair as the strain built, and Madara answered the pull with a rough sound against your flesh, his control shivering for one precious instant beneath your hand. That fracture drove you over the edge.

The orgasm broke under restraint. Your thighs tried to close around his head and found the unyielding breadth of his shoulders; your hips strained beneath his forearm, unable to flee the very sensation they chased. Madara held you inside every contraction, fingers moving slowly through the clench of your walls while his tongue refused to grant you mercy. The harder your body drew in upon itself, the more desperately you clung to him, dragging at his hair as though it were the only fixed thing in a world coming loose beneath you.

He watched you through it all, red eyes burning beneath the shadow of his hair, reading each tremor before it arrived and carrying you through it with ruthless accuracy. Only when the last shock had left you boneless did your fist loosen. His hair slipped gradually through your damp fingers, and Madara lifted his head with the faint abrasions of your grip still pulling at its roots.

He rose over you. His cock lay heavy against your stomach, thick enough that the sight of it revived apprehension beneath the pleasure still moving through you, and Madara saw that too. His wet fingers closed around himself and stroked once, spreading what he had taken from you over the head.

Your hand followed his. You closed your fingers around the heavy length of him, feeling the heat of his skin and the answering tension that travelled through his abdomen. 

Madara allowed you one slow stroke, watching his cock shift through the circle of your hand, slickened by what his fingers had taken from you, while his breath deepened above you.

When you began a second, his hand closed around your wrist. He removed you from him with the same effortless certainty he had used in the yard and pinned your hand beside your head. The refusal sent a fresh pulse of want through you.

“No,” he said, his mouth close enough to yours that the word crossed your lips like breath. “You wanted to know what I would do.” His other hand closed around your waist. “You will not distract me from the demonstration. You wanted to be handled.”

You swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then lie still.”

He released your wrist. Both hands closed around your waist and moved you down the bedding until your hips rested exactly where he wanted them. Madara knelt between your thighs, lifted one leg over his shoulder and planted the other wide against the mattress. When you attempted to adjust, he caught your hip and returned it to the angle he had chosen.

The head of his cock pressed against you.

“Madara…”

He paused, gaze fixed on yours. The Sharingan continued its slow rotation, but beneath its inhuman perception remained the man you knew, the one who listened for a change in your breathing across a dark room and slept more deeply when your hand rested over his heart.

You reached down and closed your fingers around his wrist, holding on to the pulse there as he had held yours in the yard.

“Okay.”

Madara entered you in one continuous thrust. The stretch burned, sharp and consuming, your entrance forced open around his thickness while his hand clamped around your waist and prevented retreat from what you had demanded. The sound torn from you did not resemble anything near speech. Madara’s head lowered, his jaw setting hard as your body clenched around him, and for a single strained moment the breath failed in his chest.

Then he buried himself to the root.

Fullness obliterated thought. You felt him everywhere—deep in your belly, hard between your thighs, his body crowding yours into the bed while the leg over his shoulder held you open to an angle that made him seem impossibly deeper.

He remained there until the burning eased, absolute and unmoving, giving your body time to accommodate him because he knew its limits and had no interest in damaging what had trusted itself to his hands. When your grip loosened around his wrist, he drew back.

The first thrust drove the breath from your lungs. The second shifted you up the mattress, and his hands tightened around your hips to drag you back onto his cock.

There it was, that same horrifying dominion that had infected your thoughts. Madara hauled you down to meet each thrust, setting a rhythm that turned the bed into a battlefield measured in impact and surrender—your body travelled according to his intention now. Each time he withdrew, his grip followed; each time he drove forwards, he positioned you to receive the full depth of him, and the knowledge that he could place you anywhere while choosing, always, to bring you back against him made desire burn through you with a tenderness too fierce to be gentle.

You clutched at his forearms, feeling the muscles flex beneath your palms, hard as carved stone.

“Look at me,” he said.

You tried, though pleasure kept wrenching your eyes closed.

Madara released one side of your waist and caught your jaw, holding your face towards his. “I said look.”

Your eyes opened.

The Sharingan turned in the dark of his gaze, an obscenity of attention. Madara saw everything—each flinch before it happened, each contraction of your body around him, every plea gathering beneath your skin before your mouth could give it form. He recognised the angle that made your breath fracture and returned to it. When your thigh began to tremble against his shoulder, he knew whether it came from strain or pleasure before you did, shifting his grip to support the joint without surrendering an inch of depth.

There was nowhere to hide from him, and you had never felt safer being seen.

“You wondered how it would feel,” he growled, driving deep enough that your voice failed, “to have me take your balance.”

His hand left your jaw and closed around your throat, containing rather than constricting.

“To decide how you moved.”

Madara eased your leg from his shoulder and guided it around his hip. As the angle between your bodies closed, his arm slid beneath your lower back and gathered you upwards, bearing your weight as he drew your torso from the bed. His other hand remained around your throat, guiding the tilt of your head without becoming a point of support. You clung to his shoulders, astonished, as your free leg followed the first around his waist, your ankles locking behind him while he rose fully onto his knees with his cock still buried inside you.

He held you suspended against his body—your back met no mattress and your knees found no leverage, your weight secured entirely by the arm braced beneath your waist while his other hand governed the vulnerable column of your throat.

Then he fucked you in the air.

Each thrust lifted you; each withdrawal allowed your weight to sink along his cock before the strength in his arm drove you upwards again. Your body became something he could wield, breasts crushed against his chest and mouth open against his shoulder while cries broke helplessly from you. The position should have been precarious, but in Madara’s grasp it felt inevitable.

His rhythm never faltered, nor did his grip wander into pain. The fingers around your throat remained measured while his other arm bore every shifting ounce of you, adjusting to each movement before imbalance could become danger. This was the cruelty that had occupied your thoughts for three fevered days—that he could fuck you with enough force to make the room dissolve and still account for every vulnerable part of you. His care did not diminish his power, it only revealed its true extent.

Your nails scored his shoulders, and Madara’s breath broke against your ear, a low groan catching behind his teeth as your walls tightened around him.

“Too much?” he rasped.

“No—”

“Then take it.”

He advanced on his knees and bore you backwards, the arm at your waist controlling your descent until your back struck the mattress. Madara followed, catching his weight above you so the impact travelled through the bed rather than your neck. The hand at your throat slid away and gathered both wrists beside your head.

His hips drove forwards with the weight he had withheld while you were suspended.

His name broke from your throat in a scream.

Madara’s composure fractured into hunger; his hair thrashed around you with every movement, his mouth dragging over your throat and his teeth marking the places beneath which your pulse raced. His cock struck the same devastating depth again and again until the room contracted around sensation—the wooden complaint of the bed, the wet meeting of your bodies, his breath becoming rougher beside your ear.

“Come,” he commanded.

You shook your head in desperation. “I can’t—”

The Sharingan followed the tremor through your hips. Madara shifted them by a fraction, and the next thrust struck perfectly, shattering your denial into a cry.

“There,” he said, savage satisfaction thickening his voice. “You can.”

One hand continued to hold both wrists while the other moved between your bodies. His thumb found your clit with the exact pressure that had betrayed you beneath his tongue, and he did not slow when your body began to buck helplessly beneath him. Madara held you in the centre of the pleasure he created, denying every instinctive attempt to escape it until the orgasm seized you hard enough to bleach the world white.

Your whole body clenched around him.

Madara groaned, a low and unguarded sound dragged from somewhere beneath discipline. His pace broke at last and he released your wrists to catch both hips, lifting you from the bed and pulling you down to meet the final brutal thrusts.

He came deep inside you. His cock pulsed while his hands remained locked around your waist, keeping you exactly where he needed you as the violence in his body passed without becoming violence against yours.

For a long moment, there was only breath. Yours shivering through the aftermath, his drawn slowly back under command. Madara lowered your hips to the mattress and supported one trembling leg as he unhooked it from around his waist, his palm sliding beneath your knee until the limb rested safely against the bedding. Only then did he bend over you.

His thumb traced the place on your throat where his hand had been. The touch was firm and searching, following the beat of your pulse and testing the tenderness beneath your skin. His gaze remained on your face while he checked the marks around your wrists and the flushed impressions at your hips, reading for any pain that did not belong among the pleasant aches he knew he had made.

You turned your mouth into the heel of his palm and kissed it.

Something shifted in Madara’s expression. Love rarely made him gentle; it made him exacting, jealous of your safety and almost arrogant in the belief that no one, including himself, would be permitted to harm what had trusted him. 

His thumb returned once to your pulse before he withdrew slowly from your body. You shuddered at the loss of him. Madara’s palm settled heavily over your stomach, possessive, warm and certain.

“Well?” he asked.

Your eyes opened to find that faint, insufferable curve at the corner of his mouth. You could have lied, and under other circumstances you might have, but there was little use concealing anything from a man who had watched your body surrender in the language of the Sharingan.

Instead, you reached up, caught a fistful of his hair and dragged his mouth down towards yours.

“I understand,” you whispered against his lips, “why the other man looked so surprised.”

Madara stared at you for just a moment before he laughed, a deep and rare sound that moved through his chest and into yours.

“The other man,” he said, gathering you beneath him again while the bedroom door remained scandalously open to the empty hall, “was not given the opportunity to ask for a second demonstration.”

a/n part 2: title taken from this song. i've been practicing explicit writing lately, but it will probably remain only an occasional part of my writing rather than my primary focus. if you'd like to be added to my tag list, please let me know 🖤